Fast, Painless Knee Surgery Gets Patient Home in Matter of Hours : Technology: Andrew Gilford’s first operation was grisly and the hospital stay uncomfortable. Modern procedures have changed that.

In 1975, Andrew Gilford limped into a hospital in Santa Monica braced for a week of surgical hell.

His right knee, injured several years earlier as a wide receiver for Santa Monica High’s football team, was acting up. The schedule of treatment was scarier than a lunging linebacker: Doctors would have to cut his knee wide open and remove the damaged cartilage that had collected under his kneecap.

The operation kept him bedridden for a week and left a long, sinewy scar on his knee as well as the grim prospect that once he turned 40 he would likely face additional surgery.

“True to form, I had to get it worked on again,” said Gilford, who is now a 41-year-old attorney in Irvine.

This time, his physician suggested that the once grisly surgical procedure be done at the newly opened Newport Beach Surgery Center, using the latest in video and medical technology.

On Tuesday, Gilford was wheeled into one of the center’s three operating rooms where he was greeted by Dr. Warren Kramer, who invited Gilford to forgo general anesthesia in favor of a local painkiller and watch the knee repair procedure on a television screen.

“I was totally awake, which was very interesting,” Gilford said from his Coto de Caza home hours after the surgery was completed. He talked while an in-home health care worker tended to the minor swelling in his leg.

“I could see the inside of my knee while he was working on it,” Gilford said. “I was really impressed with the whole procedure.”

Gilford is a satisfied customer of modern medicine. The quality, cost-effectiveness and speed of the knee operation illustrates the ongoing evolution of health care.

More and more, patients such as Gilford are receiving care in surroundings that, experts say, are less stressful than hospitals. More important, the patients return home to recuperate with loved ones in a familiar environment.

In Gilford’s case, he was wheeled into the operating room Tuesday morning. After administering a “spinal anesthesia,” which blocks pain to the brain without making the patient unconscious, Dr. Kramer inserted two rigid, chrome-plated poles into Gilford’s knee.

One of the poles, an arthroscope, was used to send a signal to a television screen so Kramer and Gilford could view the operation in progress. The other pole, with microcutters attached to the tip, was used to remove cartilage from under the kneecap.

Two hours later, the procedure was complete and Gilford was released.

Gilford, who was recuperating at home, took time to relax between making business calls from his living room sofa.

He said that alongside the 17-year-old scar circumscribing his knee, the only lasting reminder he will have of the second operation will be two puncture-like scars--each an eighth of an inch across--where the poles were inserted into his knee.

Unlike the first trip to the operating room, Gilford said he will not have to endure bedpans, hospital food or 2 a.m. wake-up calls by pill-carrying nurses.

Best of all, Gilford was home for Thanksgiving.

“I didn’t want that old experience again,” Gilford said. “The care this time was really incredible.”